Maps of Crete

Having just updated my maps page on this web site (especially the French and German versions of the page which were quite out of date) I noticed that most of the Anavasi Editions maps for Crete are now available through Amazon.

Crete lovers have had to make do with poor maps for a long time. In the 1990s and early 2000s the only decent maps were the 1:100.000 maps from Harms Verlag
– unless you had access to the 1:50.000 Greek military maps which were hard to almost impossible to get (the maps of Akrotiri and Sfakia are still state secrets as far as I know!).
Later some other reasonably good maps were published (for example by Road Editions) but it is only in 2006 or 2007 that better scaled maps came out.

The first 1:50.000 was a spiral bound Road Atlas of Crete which has now been replaced with a slightly easier to use hardback.

At the same time four 1:25.000 walking maps, three covering the White Mountains and one Psiloritis came out. They were not perfect maps but the quality was good (hard wearing) and they have been kept up-to-date with regular additions and corrections.

On the road map front Anavasi also published three 1:100.000 maps covering the West, Central and East region of Crete. Same hard wearing quality as the walking maps which is much less prone to falling apart in no time at all than the Harms maps (which in the mean time are a little dated and not showing a number of newer roads).

To sum it up, the Greeks (Anavasi is an Athens based company) were now producing the best maps. Unfortutnately for a long time they were not available outside of Greece which was a pity for those who wanted to indulge in a bit of travel foreplay. It seems that this has now changed and all of the maps mentioned above are currently in stock at Amazon with the exception of the Psiloritis map.

Below are some direct ordering links (as they are not always easy to find within Amazon) so that you can have all the Anavasi Crete offers in one place: